1. Technical Field
The invention relates to searching and browsing media objects. More particularly, the invention relates to a document aspect system and method for adding new levels of granularity for searching and browsing media objects and for adding new document aspects without requiring system upgrades.
2. Description of the Prior Art
ebrary, Inc. (herein referred to as ebrary) currently has a hierarchy of document containers and contents: Server>Subject>Document>Page>Word. Searches can be performed within a subject or within a document; search results are presented as lists of documents or, implicitly, as lists of pages within a document, respectively. No changes or additions to this hierarchy can be made without upgrading both the server and the client. Although, some functionality can added to the server without changing the client, it is along the lines of obtaining finer-granularity search results. Opening such a result in the existing client still renders an unchanged Document>Page>Word environment for page-browsing and document-searching.
It would be beneficial to provide a system and method that can handle changes and/or additions to such hierarchy without upgrading both the server and the client.
Currently, ebrary's technique supports additional methods of viewing and browsing a document, such as tables of contents, annotations, and the subject and document indexes. However, such current methods of viewing and browsing documents are implemented as hard-coded special cases.
It would be advantageous to implement current methods of viewing and browsing documents, which are implemented as hard-coded special cases, as generic Document Aspects, for example Table of Contents.
Granularity refers to the levels of detail available to users for searching and browsing documents. Hereinbelow in Table A is a list of granularities that ebrary currently provides.
TABLE AServerThe set of documents offered by a single server.SubjectGroups of related documents, organized hierarchically bysubject.DocumentAn individual document in its entirety.ChapterA named, contiguous portion of a document. ebrary currentlysupports Table of Contents, but users cannot search withinchapters.
It would be advantageous to provide an unlimited variety of granularities at all levels that can be useful to system users, resulting in a better user experience as well as benefits to document and technology suppliers at all tiers.
It would further be advantageous to at least provide a collections granularity that can span multiple servers; an articles granularity which may be smaller than documents but may also be larger than pages and where articles also can span multiple documents; and a sidebars granularity where sidebars can be smaller than pages but can be larger than words; and so on.
Current ebrary search results simply list documents, i.e. no finer or coarser granularity is displayed.
It would be advantageous to provide a system and method that allows for finer granularity in search results, such as for example, displaying search results within a hierarchical framework.